Hi Tom,
I am Leo, just recently joined the community. and been picking up the guide line of uboot's development.
I am a bit curious about the policy on the cover letter of patchsets. Is cover letter mandatory ?
IMHO, making it mandatory, especially on patchsets that consist of more than 1 patch, is more than useful and of great advantages.
1. Making patches clearer for peer and maintainer review
The reviewer and maintainer could immediately understand, or at least get the idea of, the whole patchset through only reading this ONE cover letter without having to dive into each of the patch.
And thus quickly determine if the patchset solves the problem or if the patchset is well organized.
2. Helping the author better organize the patchset
Writing the cover letter would require the author to scrutinize the patchset structure again, in order to elaborate his/her craft.
So when composing the letter, the relevance of each patch would be thoroghly looked over and the patchset might be refined into small but more closely-related patchsets.
And it would be easier for the maintainer to pull small gradual changes than a huge patchset with lots of changes at once.
In all, I think it would be nice to write cover letter to introduce the work.
If I miss anything or misunderstand anything please let me know, thanks in advance.
Best regards, Leo